Canada

Day 1

The first thing that strikes me about Toronto is the similarity to the New York of the movies. It’s a proper city of skyscrapers, of straight angles of glass that stretch ever upward. I can’t help but gawk a little at the sheer scale of it all, like the country bumpkin that I am. But then again, what better place to learn how to appreciate a city than one that looks so much like the ideal of The Big City?

The second thing I notice, as I start walking, is a man staggering straight into a busy road. He reeks of cannabis as he lurches past me.

Turns out that the room I’ve booked is in the Gay Village, which is an odd combination of grotty and elegant. The room is in a terraced house of tawny dressed stone, in front of a park that’s mostly concrete and has a few people passed out in it.

Day 2

Going to a museum is such an obvious, tourist thing to do, but on the other hand, what else are you supposed to do when visiting a city? Plus, to be fair, the Royal Ontario Museum, a traditional stone building with an angular metal-and-glass entrance jutting out of it like some kind of cybernetic infection, is a very good museum. It has dinosaur fossils, it has Egyptian mummies, it has huge totem poles, it has, unfortunately, swarms of schoolchildren – it has, in essence, everything you could expect from a museum. It even has a piece of cerussite, which is a gemstone that resembles a diamond but is even shinier. Perfect heist-fodder.

Despite my efforts at being a city man in these teeming concrete canyons, I find myself instinctively, almost subconsciously, gravitating towards less busy spaces. Which, in Toronto, means boarding a ferry to the islands in the vast Lake Ontario.

I’m in a park on one of the islands – grass and trees, populated with squirrels and birds. All conventional and familiar. Except the squirrels here are black instead of grey, the birds – thrushes – are orange instead of speckled brown, and despite being May, the trees are still mostly leafless. Altogether, it’s a little disconcerting, like a parallel reality.

Still a little too tame and manicured for me, I follow roads and bridges until I’m in a patch of pine forest. This is better, even if there are no toilets. Never mind – the humble tree is nature’s toilet. Although, I notice that this particular tree is also home to an ant colony. Back on the path, I realise that the painful itching on my ankles is coming from biting ants who are unappreciative of their colony’s new swimming pool. Socks eventually cleared of angry insects, I emerge out of the trees onto an isolated beach, where I’m greeted by a tree-framed view of Toronto’s skyline. Dwarfed by the CN Tower – at one point the world’s tallest tower – it’s an extraordinary sight. A silvery-blue cluster of enormous skyscrapers, under a cloudy sky criss-crossed by birds, planes, and a distant helicopter.

Sitting hunched over at the bar, I look into my glass and brood. I don’t really have anything to brood over, but I am sitting at a dimly-lit bar in North America, so it feels like I should be staring into a glass of whisky and brooding. Except that there’s just water in this glass. Also the bar is in a trendy taco restaurant called La Carnita which uses ingredients like “pickled kohlrabi” and “grains-of-paradise”, so it doesn’t really fit into whatever noir fantasy I’m having. Food is good, though.

Day 3

Going to a gallery is a thing that sophisticated city people do, right? Looking at sculptures and saying, ‘Hmm, yes,’ or ‘How audacious,’ that kind of thing? The Art Gallery of Ontario seems like the right kind of place for that. There is a café with a wood-framed vaulted ceiling for me to have a presumably-overpriced coffee in, anyway.  Much of the work on display, both painting and sculpture, historical and modern, baroque and minimalist, is genuinely compelling, although the occasional empty political gesture does get on my nerves a little. Maybe being a member of the urban bourgeoisie is just not for me.

Day 4

Done trying to pass as a one of the urban middle-class, I’ve gone through a hellish amount of queues and delays in Toronto’s Pearson Airport to fly to Calgary. From there, I’ve got on a coach heading to Banff, in the Rocky Mountains. But between Calgary and Banff is miles and miles of North American prairie, which makes the view through the window one of grass, grass, fence, grass, grass, distant building, grass, grass, etc. Despite the monotony, I take the liking to the vastness of the prairies. Maybe it’s the blocky, grey claustrophobia of Toronto’s streets, hemmed in by the skyscrapers, that makes the sense of space out here seem limitless.

More and more trees start to appear, and the changing landscape makes a part of my subconscious that’s particularly slow on the uptake finally realise that I really am in North America. The tree cover then thickens into forests, and then the forests form a great wilderness that stretches from the road to a horizon of massive jagged peaks, crowned with snow. After a while, I realise that my mouth has dropped open.

By the time I arrive in Banff, late due to the delayed flight, the light is starting to fail and a light flurry of snow is falling. I’m staying in a B&B called Tan-y-Bryn, whose Welsh name had taken me by surprise while I was booking, and after I’ve been checked into my room by a 90-year-old woman, I take a quick look around the town. Banff is a tourist town, but in the midst of the pine-covered mountains, the snow, and the deer openly grazing on the grassy verges, it seems undeniably, genuinely Canadian.

Day 5

I can see more snowbound peaks in the distance. It occurs to me that climbing one of those must be an extraordinary experience, but I have no plans to do so. Not yet, anyway. There’s a trail nearby that goes through a section of forest and past some lakes; that’ll do for this morning. There are, in these mountains, at least four species that are capable of preying on humans: grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, and pumas. Even coyotes have been known to be dangerous, and I think I can hear some yapping nearby as I walk through the forest. I’ll probably head further into their abode later.

Dinner is at a Louisiana-themed restaurant, where the Cajun-accented waiter accepts my order of deep-fried alligator chunks with equanimity, but asks, ‘Are you sure?’ when I order the “Swampwater” mocktail, which is an intriguing combination/unholy marriage of Coke and milk. I actually quite like the creamy cola, and alligator meat turns out to be white, fatty, and a little tough.

Much like myself.

Day 6

I have failed to find any bear spray, but I would say that I’m ready to go deeper into the forest by now, probably, and follow a trail into the great pine forest that blanket this part of the Rockies. Handy thing about pine forests, or at least the expanse of tall conifers that I’m in: all the branches are at the top, which means, in theory, that you should be able to see a bear coming from quite far away. I’ve passed a sign warning that it’s breeding season for elks, and that elk mothers can be violently protective of their young. I keep an eye out for both, or indeed anything that might want to eat me or kick my head in, but I see nothing alarming. What I do see, as I climb the steep path up the side of a valley, is an expanse of wilderness that seems to stretch endlessly to the horizon.

Then I find myself next to a busy road adjacent to a campground. Again, I have failed to leave civilisation.

Day 7

There are more of these mountains to explore, so onwards to Lake Louise, one of the most striking places in the Rocky Mountains, or so I’ve heard. The hostel I’m staying in, though, is on a grim patch of gravel next to the road, along with a few other buildings that form a hamlet of sorts, but the surrounding mountains are pristinely white under an equally pristine blue sky.

Day 8

Lake Louise is famous for its almost iridescent blue water, and, ringed by ermine peaks and emerald forest, is one of the great postcard-images of the world.

Or rather, it is when it isn’t frozen over.

The snow has taken longer to thaw than usual this year, so the lake and its accompanying mountains are still snowbound. While gazing at the – in all fairness – still fairly impressive lake with the throngs of other tourists, I notice a couple of middle-aged men try to climb a path that goes up past the lake, only to start to slip and turn back. Seized by a sudden desire to prove my relatively fit youth, I decide that this is the trail I’m going to take this morning.

I struggle up a slope of ice and deep snow. If I put too much weight onto one of my feet, it plunges into at least a foot of snow. Despite all this, it turns out that this is a very popular trail, so I also have to contend with crowds of other hikers, frequently stepping off the trail and waiting, with freezing water seeping into my boots, for other hikers to inch past. I eventually reach another, smaller lake (also frozen) then, higher up, a café that’s closed. Probably because the benches outside are almost entirely buried in snow.

Then I have to walk back down the ice-covered mountain path.

Of course I end up falling over and sliding down a slope on my arse. I even manage go around a corner like on a race track. It would be fun if it wasn’t so cold and wet.

Day 9

The coach back to the airport stops in Banff for an hour, so I take one last walk in the forest. Despite everything, I’m a little put out about the amount of wildlife I’ve seen. I know I was unlikely of seeing a bear or a wolf or a puma, and even if I did, it would not necessarily be a happy occasion. But still, I had hoped that maybe a moose, or an eagle, or even a beaver would have been possible. But nothing but the very common deer, some squirrels, and birds. Which is why I’m taken completely by surprise when a brown, fluffy creature suddenly hops up on a log next to me. I gawp at it for a second, then scramble to reach my camera. The creature, an American marten, looks at me, completely unconcerned, then leisurely bounds away, disappearing as I finally get my camera out.

My arrival back in Toronto is a disaster, as the maps app on my phone initially sends me to the wrong hotel, then when I finally do get to the right hotel, some bad budget planning means I have to call my mother. Even worse, at one point the receptionist says, ‘So, you’re from England, huh?’.

Day 10

Another day hanging around a city with a rucksack that’s almost the same size as me, waiting. The flight isn’t for a few hours yet, so I have time for one last piece of Canada: poutine. Chips smothered in gravy and cheese curds. It’s the kind of food that eating it during daylight hours just feels…wrong.

I don’t think that this is what’s going to stay with me from Canada. I don’t think it’s going to be the towering skyscrapers, an excellent museum, or even those massive pancakes I had at Lake Louise. I think it’s going to be the memory of deep green pine forests on the shores of a mirror-like mountain lake, and a beckoning promise of solitude.